What A Difference Three Years Makes

Think back three years ago and think forward to three years’ time – what were you doing then, what will you be doing in the future? Perhaps you have children who were 4 years old then, are now 7 and will be 10, so massive changes are underway. Politically, three years ago Donald Trump wasn’t a politician, now he’s standard for US President and in three years’ time the next political cycle will be starting – can’t wait eh?

There’s no doubt about it, we all need to keep alert to changes and, of course, cloud is one of the fastest-moving technologies. So it was great to see a new report published by the UK’s Computing magazine that in part looked at people’s cloud strategy three years ago, now, and their prediction for three years’ time.

The Computing Cloud & Infrastructure Review focuses on the growth of the market for cloud computing. The meteoric rate of growth in the use of cloud services, along with the sheer number of services which now depend on it, mean that cloud has moved from being used selectively for only non-critical applications and workloads to being a mainstream proposition for organisations of all sizes.

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The research project was conducted in four phases, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods with over 250 decision makers from large UK organizations taking part. The full report is available for download (registration) from here: https://incisive.cvtr.io/lp/qa-ctg?wp=699

For me, the key graphic is the one comparing the cloud strategy of organizations three years ago with today and expectations for three years’ time – over 60% believed that they had no cloud 3 years ago, this has shrunk to below 20% and is expected to keep falling to below 5% in three years’ time. As Skyhigh’s figures show that there is no organization without at least some cloud computing in use, even these results could be behind the real adoption curve, but it shows a dramatic change in just a short time.

Perhaps even more important is that this is clearly being driven from the top – with more than 10% of organisations expecting to have a “cloud-only” infrastructure and another 40% taking a “cloud-first” approach, showing that strategic decisions are being made to drive computing towards the cloud at speed.

Other key highlights from the research include:

Seventy-seven per cent of those surveyed were using approved cloud services to some extent. A further 10 per cent were trialling them.

Three-quarters of survey respondents expected their use of cloud services to increase in the next year.

SaaS was still the most popular way for organisations to kick off their cloud strategies – 67 per cent of respondents had subscribed to at least one SaaS.

IaaS and PaaS were less popular now but were expected to show the strongest growth in the next three years.

Twenty per cent are currently pursuing a “cloud-first” strategy. By 2019, 40 per cent expected to be doing so.

Security remained the most frequently raised objection to public cloud although the perception of public cloud security has improved enormously.